Friday, September 4, 2015

Outside of Houston and its suburb of Trumbull, old Pops finds one of his cows dead with a laceration created by no earthly means, and through which all her internal organs had been removed. Next thing you know, stories of UFOs and little gray men start circulating and grab national attention.

From there, a wide cast of characters get drawn in to what is no longer a story of UFOs and little gray men, but of violence, evil, and demon possession.

Although the story is definitely Christian Fiction and definitely supernatural, I'm not sure what to think of it. It was compelling enough to keep me going, and Jared certainly knows how to pull a reader in, but there were so many . . . curiosities to the structure of the book that threw me off and yanked me out of the story. Jared presented several newspaper or magazine articles in scenes of their own, some of which seemed to rehash what he'd just written in a POV scene. Later in the book POV characters started coming from the blue. Far too much time was spent presenting the eulogy and sermon of a minor character--not even a character, really, but a minor character's rarely mentioned sister.

And the most curious of all wasn't in the grand battle between good and evil, but afterward. One night, the sheriff gets his arm shot off, and seemingly the next day he's joining his friend at the cafe--without his arm, of course, but he claims not to miss it. Frankly, I don't know how long it takes to recuperate from blood loss after having an arm shot off, but the turn-around time seemed more unrealistic than the fantastic climax.

Aside from what I've presented here, I think Jared unnecessarily complicated the telling of what would otherwise be a good story.

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